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William Whitehead
William Whitehead (1715 - 14 April 1785) was an English poet and playwright, who served as Poet Laureate. Life Overview Whitehead, son of a baker at Cambridge, and educated at Winchester School and Cambridge, became tutor in the family of the Earl of Jersey, and retained the favour of the family through life. In 1757 he succeeded Colley Cibber as Poet Laureate. He wrote plays of only moderate quality, including The Roman Father and Creusa, tragedies, and The School for Lovers, a comedy; also poems, The Enthusiast and Variety. His official productions as Laureate were severely attacked, which drew from him in reply A Charge to the Poets.John William Cousin, "Whitehead, William," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 404. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 18, 2018. Youth and education Whitehead was born at Cambridge early in 1715, and baptised on 12 Feb. at St. Botolph's, in which parish his father carried on the trade of a baker, serving Pembroke Hall. The elder Whitehead, while bestowing a liberal education on both his sons, is said to have been inclined to extravagance, and to have chiefly employed his time in ornamenting a plot of land near Grantchester, which long went under the name of Whitehead's Folly. 2 years before his death his 2nd son William, when 14 years of age, through the patronage of Henry Bromley (afterwards Lord Montfort, and high steward of the University of Cambridge), obtained a nomination to Winchester College, where he remained till 1735.Ward, 106. It was the period, as Whitehead afterwards sang, "when Bigg presided and when Burton taught." He is said to have acted the parts of Marcia in Cato and of one of the women in the Andria, and in 1733 to have gained one of the guinea prizes offered by Peterborough, on a visit to the school, for the best poem on a subject to be given out by his companion Pope, who chose Peterborough himself as the theme. This led to his being employed by Pope to translate into Latin the 1st epistle of the Essay on Man; but this effort was not published, and Whitehead, although a competent scholar, never attained to distinction as a writer of Latin verse. In 1735, not commanding sufficient interest to secure election to Oxford, he entered Clare College, Cambridge, as a sizar, with the aid of a small scholarship open to the orphan sons of tradesmen of the town. He earned a B.A. in 1739 and an M.A. in 1743, and in 1742 was elected a fellow of his college. His irreproachable conduct, amiable manners, and growing reputation as a poet secured to him at Cambridge the friendship of many young men of a rank superior to his own, conspicuous among whom was Charles Townshend (1725–1767), to whom two of his early poems are addressed (ii. 171, 173). In his lines "On Friendship" (ii. 129), justly praised by his biographer and according to him highly commended by Thomas Gray, Whitehead softened what the latter disliked as satirical touches; but though he was through life more or less dependent on his social superiors, his nature was not servile, and his lack of ambition was largely due to self-knowledge (see the lines, ii. 192, addressed in 1751 to his friend Wright).Ward, 107. Early career In 1745 Whitehead, at the request of the Earl of Jersey, undertook the private tuition of his surviving son, Viscount Villiers, then a boy of 7 — who afterwards as Lord Jersey, was reputed one of the most high bred as well as one of the most fashionable men of his age — and a young companion. He accordingly moved to London, and shortly afterwards abandoned his fellowship, as its retention would have obliged him to take orders. At Cambridge Whitehead had published his earliest more important poetic efforts, which showed him to have deliberately formed his style as a writer of verse upon Pope, at a time when English poetical literature was at last on the very point of widening its range as to both form and subjects. Within these years Whitehead became well known in the world of letters and of the theatre, and on 24 Feb. 1750 Garrick (to whom he had addressed a very judicious compliment in verse, containing a characteristic hint as to the morals of the stage; Works, ii. 176) brought out at Drury Lane his tragedy of the Roman Father, which was a theatrical success, t In June 1754 he accompanied his pupil, Lord Villiers, and Lord Nuneham, the eldest son of the Earl of Harcourt, to Leipzig. A tour in Germany and Italy followed, and the travelers did not return to England till the autumn of 1756. The "Elegies" in which Whitehead commemorated their visits to the mausoleum of Augustus and other places of interest have not permanently added to his poetic fame; but they were not inopportunely written. While still in Italy he had been appointed by the Duke of Newcastle, through the influence of Lady Jersey, to the "two genteel patent places usually united" of secretary and registrar of the order of the Bath.Ward, 108. Poet Laureate When Colley Cibber passed away in December 1757, the Duke of Devonshire, as lord chamberlain, offered to Whitehead the poet-laureateship, which had been previously refused by Gray. The latter was to have been permitted to hold it as a sinecure; but Whitehead's muse was called upon in the usual way, and executed herself in a series of birthday odes extending over more than a quarter of a century, as well as of special effusions on occasions such as a peace or a royal marriage. In his own day the series at large was visited with much unfriendly comment. Johnson, who seems to have felt no particular gratitude to Whitehead for having helped to make the plan of his dictionary known to Chesterfield, compared Cibber's birthday odes with Whitehead's, to the disadvantage of the latter; for "grand nonsense is insupportable." John Byrom, the Lancashire poet, in 1758 coupled Whitehead's Verses to the People of England with Akenside's Appeal to the Country Gentlemen of England as illustrative of the jingoism of the hour (Poems of John Byrom, printed for the Chetham Soc., 1894, i. 459). Churchill, who had suddenly sprung into fame and was beginning to pour forth volume after volume of furious invective, in bk. iii. of ‘The Ghost’ (1762) apostrophised the laureate as "Dulness and Method's darling Son." Whitehead but once made a public reply to these and other attacks in A Charge to the Poets (1st printed in 1762), which introduces itself as a sort of sequel to his early poem on The Danger of writing in Verse, and, in the humorous form of a charge from the laureate to his brother poets, very reasonably and very good-humouredly explains and defends his position. In A Pathetic Apology for all Laureates: Past, present, and to come, privately circulated among his friends, he put the matter still more plainly, and with the same modest bonhomie. And whether or not he actually cherished the design of replying to Churchill in a longer poem, he was wise enough never to carry it out, though the fragments which remain are in part generous as well as essentially just in spirit. In the year in which Churchill had sought to write down the laureate as a dunce and fool, Whitehead had produced at Drury Lane on 10 February his comedy of The School for Lovers (1762), which has been erroneously supposed to belong to the species called sentimental comedy. The life of the play is to be found in the characters of Araminta and Modely, which are genuinely comic, while the former is also unmistakably attractive (cf. Genest, iv. 640). The success of this comedy (which was revived in 1775 and 1794) seems to have increased Garrick's confidence in Whitehead, who in the following years officiated as his "reader" of plays. When in 1767 Garrick was hesitating as to the production of Goldsmith's Good-natured Man, he proposed Whitehead, who for some time acted as reader of new plays for Drury Lane, to him as arbitrator in the difficulty — "of all the manager's slights to the poet," according to the biographer of the latter, that which was "forgotten last" (Forster, Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 5th edit. 1871, ii. 41). On 6 Jan. 1770 Whitehead's Trip to Scotland was performed at Drury Lane, which may be described as a farce ending like an extravaganza. For many years after his return from the continent Whitehead remained the welcome household friend of Lords Jersey and Harcourt, and resided in the town house of the former, and in the summer at Middleton and at Nuneham, of which frequent mention is made in his verse, and where some lines by him on the gardener, Walter Clark, are stated as still to be seen in the grounds. After the death of Lord Jersey in 1769, and the accession to the title of his former pupil, Whitehead occupied apartments in London, but still kept up his intimacy with both families. In 1774 he collected his works in 2 volumes, under the title of Plays and Poems. A tragedy, offered to Garrick but never published; the 1st act of an Œdipus; and a few other dramatic fragments were found among his papers at the time of his death, which took place in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square, London. Writing Plays The Roman Father is founded more or less on Corneille's Horace; but it omits the part of Horatius's wife, sister to the Curiatii, and it seeks to centre the interest in Horatius's father, the character played by Garrick. This tragedy is but a poor piece of literary work, and in execution one of the least adequate of Whitehead's performances. His 2nd tragedy, Creusa: Queen of Athens (1st acted on 20 April 1754), a recast of the Euripidean Ion with the supernatural element omitted, is far superior to its predecessor in skilfulness of construction and in dignity of style, and deserves the high praise bestowed on it by Horace Walpole (to John Chute, Letters, ed. Cunningham, ii. 382) and by Mason. These constitute Whitehead's only essays in the tragic drama, unless there should be included in them the rather clever burlesque "tragedy in the heroic taste," of Fatal Constancy; or, Love in Tears, spoken in monologue by the hero. The School for Lovers (1762) has been erroneously supposed to belong to the species called sentimental comedy. The life of the play is to be found in the characters of Araminta and Modely, which are genuinely comic, while the former is also unmistakably attractive (cf. Genest, iv. 640). Prose He wrote little in prose — a disquisition, of no moment, on the shield of Æneas, and a light essay or 2 for insertion in The World. Verse His epistle On the Danger of Writing in Verse (1741) is elegant in versification and diction, and modest in tone — two merits which are rarely absent in Whitehead. It was rapidly followed by Atys and Adrastus (from Herodotus); an "heroic epistle" from "Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth," the opposite of original in treatment, but delicate in feeling; and a readable didactic essay on ‘Ridicule’ (1743), protesting against such as is excessive or misplaced. All these pieces, as well as the rather later ‘Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol Spring’ (1751), are in the heroic couplet. A parody with a serious purpose is the city idyll, as it would perhaps be called in these days, of "The Sweepers," written in blank verse. In form Whitehead's versatility was remarkable, and about this time he produced a series of tales in four-foot iambic verse, somewhat in the manner of Prior, but more nearly perhaps in that of La Fontaine, which possess decided merit of their kind. Such are Variety: A tale for Married People; The Goat's Beard, a free expansion of one of Phædrus's fables, which playfully discusses the question of equality between the sexes; and others. These, with a number of vers de société and complimentary pieces, make up an agreeable variety of miscellaneous verse; and it would have been fortunate for Whitehead's posthumous fame had he not been called upon to put a pretentious top to so unpretending an edifice. A selection of the birthday odes is published in Whitehead's works, but cannot be said to call for posthumous criticism. Critical introduction by Thomas Humphry Ward William Whitehead, who must not be confused with his clever and disreputable namesake, Paul Whitehead, the poet of the orgies of Medmenham, succeeded Cibber in the laureateship when Gray declined that doubtful honour. He was the perpetual butt of the satire of Churchill, who, as Campbell says, ‘completely killed his poetical character.’ Indeed his poetry is for the most part tame and conventional enough; yet here and there he emerges from the ruck of Georgian poetasters and becomes noticeable. Variety: A tale for married people, which is too long for quotation, is an excellent story in verse — with a moral, of course, as a conte should have — told in a light and flowing style not unworthy of Gay. "The Enthusiast: An ode", is here given, because of the admirable way in which it epitomises the debate — it is a perennial debate, but the eighteenth century took one side and we take the other — between Nature and Society. ‘O bards, that call to bank and glen, Ye bid me go to Nature to be healed; And lo! a purer fount is here revealed, My lady-nature dwells in hearts of men:’ — when the modern poet writes in this way, we note him as breaking the poetical concert of our age. But the doctrine is one which the poets of Pope’s century were for ever enforcing; even Cowper, antithesis to Pope as he was, enforced it; and this little ode of Whitehead’s is so happy a rendering of their argument that it is worthy of being rescued from the oblivion which has almost overwhelmed its author.from Thomas Humphry Ward, "Critical Introduction: William Whitehead (1715–1785)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Feb. 26, 2016. Recognition Whitehead was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1757, and served until his death in 1785. A complete edition of Whitehead's poems, with a good memoir by his friend William Mason (1724–1797), was published at York in 1788 (3 vols. 8vo). A half-length life-sized portrait of Whitehead was painted by R. Wilson (Cat. Guelph Exhib. No. 238). Another, painted by W. Doughty in 1776, was engraved by Collyer, and prefixed to vol. iii. of Mason's edition of Whitehead's ‘Works.’ Publications Poetry *''The Danger of Writing Verse: An epistle''. London: R. Dodsley, 1741. *''Atys and Adrastus: A tale in the manner of Mr. Dryden's fables''. London: R. Manby, 1743. *''An Essay on Ridicule. London: R. Dodsley, 1743. *''Anne Boleyn to Henry the Eighth: An epistle. London: R. Dodsley, 1743. *''On Nobility: An epistle to the Rt. Hon. the Earl of --. London: R. Dodsley, 1744. *''An Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol Spring. London: R. Dodsley, 1751. *''Poems on Several Occasions''. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1754. *''Elegies; with, An ode to the Tiber''. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757. *''Verses to the People of England, 1758. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1758. *A Charge to the Poets. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1762. *Variety: A tale, for married people. London: J. Dodsley, 1776; Dublin: J. Exshaw / S. Price / D. Chamberlaine / W. Watson / J. Potts / et al, 1776. *[https://archive.org/details/goatsbeardafabl00whitgoog ''The Goat's Beard: A fable]. London: J. Dodsley, 1777.The Goat's Beard: A fable (1777), Internet Archive. Web, July 6, 2013. *''Poems by William Whitehead''. London: A. Ward, for J. Robson & W. Clarke / J. Todd, 1788. Plays *''The Roman Father: A tragedy. London: Robert Dodsley, 1750. *Creusa, Queen of Athens: A tragedy. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1754.*The School for Lovers: A comedy. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1762. *''A Trip to Scotland. London: J. Dodsley, 1770. Non-fiction *"Observations on the Shield of Aeneas", in The Works of Virgil: In Latin and English. London: R. Dodsley, 1753. Collected editions *''Plays and Poems. (2 volumes), London: J. Dodsley, 1774. Anthologized *''Odes on Peace and War. London: J. Debrett, 1795. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:William Whitehead, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Feb. 26, 2016. Poems by William Whitehead # The Je Ne Sais Quoi See also *List of British poets *List of English-language playwrights References *''Chalmers' Works of the English Poets'' (vol. 17) *''Bell's British Theatre'' (vols. 3, 7, 20) * . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 9, 2017. Notes External links ;Poems *"The Enthusiast: An ode" *William Whitehead at PoemHunter (2 poems) *William Whitehead (1715-1785) info & 10 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830 *William Whitehead at Poetry Nook (25 poems) ;Books *William Whitehead at the Online Books Page ;Audio / video *William Whitehead at LibriVox ;About *William Whitehead in the Encyclopædia Britannica * Original article is at William Whitehead * Whitehead, William" Category:1715 births Category:1785 deaths Category:People from Cambridge Category:British Poets Laureate Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:Old Wykehamists Category:18th-century poets Category:English poets Category:Poets Category:English-language poets Category:People educated at Winchester College Category:Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge